Why You Shouldn't Listen to Sharyl Attkisson Talk About Vaccine Risk Vs Disease Risk
Or anything else...
Sharyl Attkisson was once a real investigative reporter for CBS News. How she went from that, to having an award named after her for folks in the media who have done the best job using false balance and promoting myths and fake controversies about vaccines is quite sad.
Do you know anyone who deserves a Sharyl Attkisson Journalism Award?
Folks like Oprah, for giving Jenny McCarthy such a huge platform!
And folks like Katie Couric for her segment on Now with Tom Brokaw and Katie Couric about DPT “hot lots” in 1994, her 2008 segment, “How Independent Are Vaccine Defenders?,” on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, and her more recent segment on the HPV vaccine on her daytime talk show, Katie.
Why You Shouldn't Listen to Sharyl Attkisson Talk About Vaccine Risk Vs Disease Risk
Anyway, Sharyl Attkisson is still around, even though she isn’t on a major network, she still considers herself to be an investigative journalist.
What is she investigating this time?
“You’ve heard the pitch: vaccines save lives, protect the herd, keep diseases in check. But you may naturally wonder: What’s the actual risk to my kid from all these shots when compared to the diseases they’re meant to stop?”
Vaccine Risk vs. Disease Risk: The Vaccine Math Nobody Added Up—Until Now
She is “investigating” vaccine risk vs disease risk and not surprisingly, she gets it all very wrong.
For one thing, many people have considered this question before!
And the only way to think that vaccine risks are greater than disease risks is if you buy into anti-vaccine propaganda that anything and everything is a vaccine injury and that vaccine preventable diseases, like measles, are mild.
Of course, neither is true.
Still, let’s see how Sharyl Attkisson did her investigation of vaccine risk vs disease risk.
“Enter Grok, an AI from xAI, which I asked to crunch the numbers. Grok is imperfect, and yet it can still provide us a window and the best idea we, as outsiders, can get to arrive at ballpark numbers and some insight into a vexing controversy.”
Vaccine Risk vs. Disease Risk: The Vaccine Math Nobody Added Up—Until Now
She asked an AI chat bot to do her homework and concluded that serious risks from vaccinating are much higher than serious risks from disease today.
Among the serious risks from vaccinating that Grok told her kids would get?
They included death, paralysis, meningitis, disability, lung inflammation, septic shock, and birth defects, etc., any of which would be very rare, if they did happen.
While severe events can occur after vaccines, they are very rare, so she is very obviously overstating the risk of getting vaccinated.
“Then we compared that to the odds an unvaccinated kid today would catch one of 17 diseases (including measles, polio, and flu) and suffer 35 serious or 35 less serious effects from those diseases.”
Vaccine Risk vs. Disease Risk: The Vaccine Math Nobody Added Up—Until Now
How many unvaccinated children would suffer serious risks each year?
According to Sharyl Attkisson, it would only be about 56…
Now, considering how many kids die just with flu each year, I’m gonna say Sharyl Attkisson might want to do a little more investigating! She is very obviously downplaying the risk of being unvaccinated.
What else does she get wrong?
She thinks that fewer kids would get sick today, even if they stopped vaccinating.
“Keep in mind, the odds that a child will catch one of those diseases today is pretty low, and some of that is due to vaccination. I’ll address that chicken or egg point in a moment.”
Vaccine Risk vs. Disease Risk: The Vaccine Math Nobody Added Up—Until Now
Now, while fewer kids would die than they did at the beginning of the 20th century, before we had ventilators, blood transfusions, and IV antibiotics, etc., without vaccines, we would almost certainly return to more recent pre-vaccine death statistics.
And an awful lot of people would get sick.
Remember, the effects of better nutrition, sanitation, and hygiene were mostly on mortality, not morbidity. That means that while fewer people died after the beginning of the 20th century, an effect that eventually plateaued, just as many people got sick.
“Even if diseases spiked without vaccines, experts say fewer kids would die or suffer long-term than decades ago.”
Vaccine Risk vs. Disease Risk: The Vaccine Math Nobody Added Up—Until Now
Just look at the measles outbreaks in the United States in 1990, hundreds died!
Hundreds also died from invasive Hib and pneumococcal disease in the 1990s, diseases that are now vaccine-preventable - if you get vaccinated and protected…
The bottom line is this kind of analysis from Sharyl Attkisson simply follows the anti-vaccine propaganda playbook - she is trying to make you think that vaccines are dangerous and that vaccine preventable diseases are mild.
Be skeptical. Don’t believe it.
“How many unvaccinated children would suffer serious [infection] risks each year?
According to Sharyl Attkisson, it would only be about 56…”
She makes a great argument for vaccination-induced herd immunity.
“For one thing, many people have considered this question before!”
Yeah, but those people knew what they were talking about…